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Jul. 19th, 2003
e to the X, dy/dx
Jul. 19th, 2003 07:28 pmWell, this has been an exciting and informational week. And interesting, did I mention interesting? In the Chinese curse sense of "interesting"?
Managed to make it through the AP Stats Institute without embarrassing myself too badly. On Thursday, I ended up arguing against the rest of the class on one problem, but not on the math - they had chosen to block certain items together in a problem based on the environment, and I wanted to argue for morning vs. afternoon sunlight as more important than proximity to a door, which was what they wanted to use. The master teacher said that the proximity blocking was what the scoring rubric had used, but that if I had given my blocking and clearly given my argument for it, I would have gotten full credit for it. Two old guys in the back still didn't believe me about the sunlight, though.
RS was late every single day, but then she had to drive in from way out on the other side of Fort Bend every morning. (She also spilled a lot of coffee, but fortunately not on me.) There was a coach in the class (not the guy we were tripled with, although he was also a coach) who WOULD NOT SHUT UP, kept pointing out the BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS, and argued exclusively out of the book. (This is one of my educational issues with Christian fundamentalism. It encourages the fallacy of the appeal to printed authority.) On the other hand, one of the cleverest people in the course (who wore a lot of purple and green, too) turned out to be a gamer and a friend of CF's. He's publishing a game this fall; I'll have to e-mail him about it later and see when he's demoing it in this area. In addition, he went through RUSMP this summer, so hopefully I'll bump into him in that math ed subcommunity, too.
Bussed to the downtown convention center for CAMT from Rice at about noon on Friday. The Friday afternoon sessions were better, I think, than the Saturday sessions; several of the morning sessions I had wanted to go to were cancelled. On the other hand, one of the replacement sessions was Dr. L, and she seemed pleased enough to see me - and even more pleased to hear that I got AP Stats this year. (I mentioned before that Mr. B has gone to bat for me because he thinks he made a good decision hiring me; Dr. L has the same investment in me, since she found me in the first place and wrote the recommendation that got me cinched, and she doesn't have nearly as much riding on it as she's retired from the district now, so she rather enjoys bragging on me in my hearing.) Another teacher in that same workshop, who has done Carnegie training with her, is apparently one of Ms. H.R.'s new hires for our department. I hope that doesn't mean someone else quit . . .
I did learn some useful stuff about TAKS from the TEA assessment people, and I liked the sessions I did go to; I just wish not as much had been cancelled. Oh, and I had to snarl when I notices that the Sassenach had a table in the dealer's room. Really, why do they come to these things? Don't they know that the entire philosophical foundations of this conference are virulently opposed to them and all they stand for? Why should they even show up? I mean, I have some philosophical differences with the mainstream of NCTM/TCTM, but they're reconcilable - I am concerned with the gifted as the gifted, while they are concerned with the "average" student. We both want excellence to the best of their abilities from both sets of students; we differ in how much we think the special populations need in terms of extra support beyond standard classroom differentiation to reach that excellence. The Sassenach, on the other hand, have an entirely different philosophy about the learning of mathematics (for those who are not familiar with the people I'm talking about, they're a textbook publisher and they believe that computational competence (a) should proceed conceptual understanding and (b) will invariably lead to conceptual understanding on its own). I understand why they sell so well to the homeschooler crowd, but surely in an NCTM-dominated conference, they'll sell very little.
Movie Night was crowded this week - PB brought his little nephew (I wish he'd warned us ahead of time), DM and DG both showed up, and then AH and someone I don't know named M both followed DM. We ended up watching The Animatrix, which ranged from pretty good to downright silly. After the movie, we did some extra random anime (after PB, EW, and the annoying M left), which was mostly enjoyable; since PB had left and DG was still here, we watched it all subbed, which suited me fine. We also discussed the Galveston trip, which we have set a date of August 2 for. That puts it under a crescent moon, which will be fine for what I want to do. (DM and AH both made jokes about seeing them in bathing suits, which I found vaguely amusing, but I reassured them both that the primary point of the outing was in fact the aquarium at Moody Gardens, and the beach would be after dark.)
My personal favorite exchange of the evening:
DG (about the Utena movie): No! It's not even pretty! It just sucks!
Me: Well, I thought it was pretty, but I wasn't getting it, and I wasn't getting it, and I wasn't getting it, and then she turned into a car.
AH: That may be the best summary of that movie I've ever heard.
(DM falls over laughing.)
Hopefully, I'll actually get to bake for these next two Movie Nights, at least. Actually, the next three should be okay; after that, if I want to really bake and not just throw something together, I'll have to do it the night before. Still, that's doable, too, especially since I have a Bundt pan now and pound cakes don't go stale overnight, even if they're not frosted.
Managed to make it through the AP Stats Institute without embarrassing myself too badly. On Thursday, I ended up arguing against the rest of the class on one problem, but not on the math - they had chosen to block certain items together in a problem based on the environment, and I wanted to argue for morning vs. afternoon sunlight as more important than proximity to a door, which was what they wanted to use. The master teacher said that the proximity blocking was what the scoring rubric had used, but that if I had given my blocking and clearly given my argument for it, I would have gotten full credit for it. Two old guys in the back still didn't believe me about the sunlight, though.
RS was late every single day, but then she had to drive in from way out on the other side of Fort Bend every morning. (She also spilled a lot of coffee, but fortunately not on me.) There was a coach in the class (not the guy we were tripled with, although he was also a coach) who WOULD NOT SHUT UP, kept pointing out the BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS, and argued exclusively out of the book. (This is one of my educational issues with Christian fundamentalism. It encourages the fallacy of the appeal to printed authority.) On the other hand, one of the cleverest people in the course (who wore a lot of purple and green, too) turned out to be a gamer and a friend of CF's. He's publishing a game this fall; I'll have to e-mail him about it later and see when he's demoing it in this area. In addition, he went through RUSMP this summer, so hopefully I'll bump into him in that math ed subcommunity, too.
Bussed to the downtown convention center for CAMT from Rice at about noon on Friday. The Friday afternoon sessions were better, I think, than the Saturday sessions; several of the morning sessions I had wanted to go to were cancelled. On the other hand, one of the replacement sessions was Dr. L, and she seemed pleased enough to see me - and even more pleased to hear that I got AP Stats this year. (I mentioned before that Mr. B has gone to bat for me because he thinks he made a good decision hiring me; Dr. L has the same investment in me, since she found me in the first place and wrote the recommendation that got me cinched, and she doesn't have nearly as much riding on it as she's retired from the district now, so she rather enjoys bragging on me in my hearing.) Another teacher in that same workshop, who has done Carnegie training with her, is apparently one of Ms. H.R.'s new hires for our department. I hope that doesn't mean someone else quit . . .
I did learn some useful stuff about TAKS from the TEA assessment people, and I liked the sessions I did go to; I just wish not as much had been cancelled. Oh, and I had to snarl when I notices that the Sassenach had a table in the dealer's room. Really, why do they come to these things? Don't they know that the entire philosophical foundations of this conference are virulently opposed to them and all they stand for? Why should they even show up? I mean, I have some philosophical differences with the mainstream of NCTM/TCTM, but they're reconcilable - I am concerned with the gifted as the gifted, while they are concerned with the "average" student. We both want excellence to the best of their abilities from both sets of students; we differ in how much we think the special populations need in terms of extra support beyond standard classroom differentiation to reach that excellence. The Sassenach, on the other hand, have an entirely different philosophy about the learning of mathematics (for those who are not familiar with the people I'm talking about, they're a textbook publisher and they believe that computational competence (a) should proceed conceptual understanding and (b) will invariably lead to conceptual understanding on its own). I understand why they sell so well to the homeschooler crowd, but surely in an NCTM-dominated conference, they'll sell very little.
Movie Night was crowded this week - PB brought his little nephew (I wish he'd warned us ahead of time), DM and DG both showed up, and then AH and someone I don't know named M both followed DM. We ended up watching The Animatrix, which ranged from pretty good to downright silly. After the movie, we did some extra random anime (after PB, EW, and the annoying M left), which was mostly enjoyable; since PB had left and DG was still here, we watched it all subbed, which suited me fine. We also discussed the Galveston trip, which we have set a date of August 2 for. That puts it under a crescent moon, which will be fine for what I want to do. (DM and AH both made jokes about seeing them in bathing suits, which I found vaguely amusing, but I reassured them both that the primary point of the outing was in fact the aquarium at Moody Gardens, and the beach would be after dark.)
My personal favorite exchange of the evening:
DG (about the Utena movie): No! It's not even pretty! It just sucks!
Me: Well, I thought it was pretty, but I wasn't getting it, and I wasn't getting it, and I wasn't getting it, and then she turned into a car.
AH: That may be the best summary of that movie I've ever heard.
(DM falls over laughing.)
Hopefully, I'll actually get to bake for these next two Movie Nights, at least. Actually, the next three should be okay; after that, if I want to really bake and not just throw something together, I'll have to do it the night before. Still, that's doable, too, especially since I have a Bundt pan now and pound cakes don't go stale overnight, even if they're not frosted.
e to the X, dy/dx
Jul. 19th, 2003 07:28 pmWell, this has been an exciting and informational week. And interesting, did I mention interesting? In the Chinese curse sense of "interesting"?
Managed to make it through the AP Stats Institute without embarrassing myself too badly. On Thursday, I ended up arguing against the rest of the class on one problem, but not on the math - they had chosen to block certain items together in a problem based on the environment, and I wanted to argue for morning vs. afternoon sunlight as more important than proximity to a door, which was what they wanted to use. The master teacher said that the proximity blocking was what the scoring rubric had used, but that if I had given my blocking and clearly given my argument for it, I would have gotten full credit for it. Two old guys in the back still didn't believe me about the sunlight, though.
RS was late every single day, but then she had to drive in from way out on the other side of Fort Bend every morning. (She also spilled a lot of coffee, but fortunately not on me.) There was a coach in the class (not the guy we were tripled with, although he was also a coach) who WOULD NOT SHUT UP, kept pointing out the BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS, and argued exclusively out of the book. (This is one of my educational issues with Christian fundamentalism. It encourages the fallacy of the appeal to printed authority.) On the other hand, one of the cleverest people in the course (who wore a lot of purple and green, too) turned out to be a gamer and a friend of CF's. He's publishing a game this fall; I'll have to e-mail him about it later and see when he's demoing it in this area. In addition, he went through RUSMP this summer, so hopefully I'll bump into him in that math ed subcommunity, too.
Bussed to the downtown convention center for CAMT from Rice at about noon on Friday. The Friday afternoon sessions were better, I think, than the Saturday sessions; several of the morning sessions I had wanted to go to were cancelled. On the other hand, one of the replacement sessions was Dr. L, and she seemed pleased enough to see me - and even more pleased to hear that I got AP Stats this year. (I mentioned before that Mr. B has gone to bat for me because he thinks he made a good decision hiring me; Dr. L has the same investment in me, since she found me in the first place and wrote the recommendation that got me cinched, and she doesn't have nearly as much riding on it as she's retired from the district now, so she rather enjoys bragging on me in my hearing.) Another teacher in that same workshop, who has done Carnegie training with her, is apparently one of Ms. H.R.'s new hires for our department. I hope that doesn't mean someone else quit . . .
I did learn some useful stuff about TAKS from the TEA assessment people, and I liked the sessions I did go to; I just wish not as much had been cancelled. Oh, and I had to snarl when I notices that the Sassenach had a table in the dealer's room. Really, why do they come to these things? Don't they know that the entire philosophical foundations of this conference are virulently opposed to them and all they stand for? Why should they even show up? I mean, I have some philosophical differences with the mainstream of NCTM/TCTM, but they're reconcilable - I am concerned with the gifted as the gifted, while they are concerned with the "average" student. We both want excellence to the best of their abilities from both sets of students; we differ in how much we think the special populations need in terms of extra support beyond standard classroom differentiation to reach that excellence. The Sassenach, on the other hand, have an entirely different philosophy about the learning of mathematics (for those who are not familiar with the people I'm talking about, they're a textbook publisher and they believe that computational competence (a) should proceed conceptual understanding and (b) will invariably lead to conceptual understanding on its own). I understand why they sell so well to the homeschooler crowd, but surely in an NCTM-dominated conference, they'll sell very little.
Movie Night was crowded this week - PB brought his little nephew (I wish he'd warned us ahead of time), DM and DG both showed up, and then AH and someone I don't know named M both followed DM. We ended up watching The Animatrix, which ranged from pretty good to downright silly. After the movie, we did some extra random anime (after PB, EW, and the annoying M left), which was mostly enjoyable; since PB had left and DG was still here, we watched it all subbed, which suited me fine. We also discussed the Galveston trip, which we have set a date of August 2 for. That puts it under a crescent moon, which will be fine for what I want to do. (DM and AH both made jokes about seeing them in bathing suits, which I found vaguely amusing, but I reassured them both that the primary point of the outing was in fact the aquarium at Moody Gardens, and the beach would be after dark.)
My personal favorite exchange of the evening:
DG (about the Utena movie): No! It's not even pretty! It just sucks!
Me: Well, I thought it was pretty, but I wasn't getting it, and I wasn't getting it, and I wasn't getting it, and then she turned into a car.
AH: That may be the best summary of that movie I've ever heard.
(DM falls over laughing.)
Hopefully, I'll actually get to bake for these next two Movie Nights, at least. Actually, the next three should be okay; after that, if I want to really bake and not just throw something together, I'll have to do it the night before. Still, that's doable, too, especially since I have a Bundt pan now and pound cakes don't go stale overnight, even if they're not frosted.
Managed to make it through the AP Stats Institute without embarrassing myself too badly. On Thursday, I ended up arguing against the rest of the class on one problem, but not on the math - they had chosen to block certain items together in a problem based on the environment, and I wanted to argue for morning vs. afternoon sunlight as more important than proximity to a door, which was what they wanted to use. The master teacher said that the proximity blocking was what the scoring rubric had used, but that if I had given my blocking and clearly given my argument for it, I would have gotten full credit for it. Two old guys in the back still didn't believe me about the sunlight, though.
RS was late every single day, but then she had to drive in from way out on the other side of Fort Bend every morning. (She also spilled a lot of coffee, but fortunately not on me.) There was a coach in the class (not the guy we were tripled with, although he was also a coach) who WOULD NOT SHUT UP, kept pointing out the BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS, and argued exclusively out of the book. (This is one of my educational issues with Christian fundamentalism. It encourages the fallacy of the appeal to printed authority.) On the other hand, one of the cleverest people in the course (who wore a lot of purple and green, too) turned out to be a gamer and a friend of CF's. He's publishing a game this fall; I'll have to e-mail him about it later and see when he's demoing it in this area. In addition, he went through RUSMP this summer, so hopefully I'll bump into him in that math ed subcommunity, too.
Bussed to the downtown convention center for CAMT from Rice at about noon on Friday. The Friday afternoon sessions were better, I think, than the Saturday sessions; several of the morning sessions I had wanted to go to were cancelled. On the other hand, one of the replacement sessions was Dr. L, and she seemed pleased enough to see me - and even more pleased to hear that I got AP Stats this year. (I mentioned before that Mr. B has gone to bat for me because he thinks he made a good decision hiring me; Dr. L has the same investment in me, since she found me in the first place and wrote the recommendation that got me cinched, and she doesn't have nearly as much riding on it as she's retired from the district now, so she rather enjoys bragging on me in my hearing.) Another teacher in that same workshop, who has done Carnegie training with her, is apparently one of Ms. H.R.'s new hires for our department. I hope that doesn't mean someone else quit . . .
I did learn some useful stuff about TAKS from the TEA assessment people, and I liked the sessions I did go to; I just wish not as much had been cancelled. Oh, and I had to snarl when I notices that the Sassenach had a table in the dealer's room. Really, why do they come to these things? Don't they know that the entire philosophical foundations of this conference are virulently opposed to them and all they stand for? Why should they even show up? I mean, I have some philosophical differences with the mainstream of NCTM/TCTM, but they're reconcilable - I am concerned with the gifted as the gifted, while they are concerned with the "average" student. We both want excellence to the best of their abilities from both sets of students; we differ in how much we think the special populations need in terms of extra support beyond standard classroom differentiation to reach that excellence. The Sassenach, on the other hand, have an entirely different philosophy about the learning of mathematics (for those who are not familiar with the people I'm talking about, they're a textbook publisher and they believe that computational competence (a) should proceed conceptual understanding and (b) will invariably lead to conceptual understanding on its own). I understand why they sell so well to the homeschooler crowd, but surely in an NCTM-dominated conference, they'll sell very little.
Movie Night was crowded this week - PB brought his little nephew (I wish he'd warned us ahead of time), DM and DG both showed up, and then AH and someone I don't know named M both followed DM. We ended up watching The Animatrix, which ranged from pretty good to downright silly. After the movie, we did some extra random anime (after PB, EW, and the annoying M left), which was mostly enjoyable; since PB had left and DG was still here, we watched it all subbed, which suited me fine. We also discussed the Galveston trip, which we have set a date of August 2 for. That puts it under a crescent moon, which will be fine for what I want to do. (DM and AH both made jokes about seeing them in bathing suits, which I found vaguely amusing, but I reassured them both that the primary point of the outing was in fact the aquarium at Moody Gardens, and the beach would be after dark.)
My personal favorite exchange of the evening:
DG (about the Utena movie): No! It's not even pretty! It just sucks!
Me: Well, I thought it was pretty, but I wasn't getting it, and I wasn't getting it, and I wasn't getting it, and then she turned into a car.
AH: That may be the best summary of that movie I've ever heard.
(DM falls over laughing.)
Hopefully, I'll actually get to bake for these next two Movie Nights, at least. Actually, the next three should be okay; after that, if I want to really bake and not just throw something together, I'll have to do it the night before. Still, that's doable, too, especially since I have a Bundt pan now and pound cakes don't go stale overnight, even if they're not frosted.